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Why Your Email Marketing Conversion Rate Is Low – And How To Fix It

Email marketing is undoubtedly the best proven method of getting the highest conversion rates. A nicely worded email sent to a personal i...

Email marketing is undoubtedly the best proven method of getting the highest conversion rates. A nicely worded email sent to a personal inbox has high chances of being opened by people. In fact, email users spend 28% of their time looking at their inbox and responding to emails! This is an interesting statistic to keep in mind as the owner of a website.

When your email marketing campaign is rolling out, you expect people to click at the subscription box on your website and be a part of your business through the email newsletter. However, this may not be the case for every website owner. Despite spending a hefty sum on digital marketing, there may be a constant decline in conversion rates. The low conversion rate can stem from a lack of cohesion between your emails, website content, and customer service.

Firstly, is your marketing team keeping an eye on important metrics during a campaign? How much time does your team spend on recording the key email marketing or e-commerce metrics? Use any time-tracking tool such as Toggle or Basecamp to create detailed project-specific reports for your business. You will be surprised to find the loopholes in your strategy once you measure it with time and efficiency. The key metrics include:

How many people opened the email

How many people clicked on a link inside the email

How many people unsubscribed

How many people registered complaints

How many people forwarded your email

When these things are measured and noted regularly, the result can define how your email marketing campaign is doing. However, unless the user ‘opens’ the email, no further action can take place. Without performing this simple action, no one can go to the sales funnel of your email marketing strategy. That’s why ‘open’ rate is so important for emails. There are several reasons behind this, but one particular reason tops them all- your site’s speed.

A study by Akamai found out that 47% of people expect a web page to load in two seconds or less.40% will abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load and 52% of online shoppers say quick page loads are important for their loyalty to a site. How do you expect users to subscribe to your email list or newsletter when the site is not loading properly?

If your email marketing campaign analysis is constantly showing a low conversion rate, it is time for you to work on your site’s speed. Website owners are taking this seriously and working towards seamless user experience and lower site loading time. Website speed checker tool called Pingdom has collected statistics of websites that have used their tool in the past year and the average load time is 5 seconds from 7.72 seconds in 2013.However, this is still a long stretch from the coveted 2 second average load time as Google’s e-commerce website acceptability standard. To reach this average, here are some fixes you can make on your site:

Minimize the HTTP requests

An HTTP request is originated every time the site is downloading various parts of the page, like images, stylesheets, Flash, etc. Yahoo reports that 80% of the load time of a site is spent on making these requests. Simplify your site navigation and design elements to reduce load time.

Use CSS instead of images where it is possible

Combine multiple stylesheets into one

Reduce scripts and put them in the bottom of the page.

In your website interface, always remember that minimal is better.

Use a content delivery network

One of the easiest ways to speed up your site and managed services that you are provide is by hosting your media files on a content delivery network (CDN). It can often save up to 60% of bandwidth and halve the number of HTTP requests made by your website. CDNs host your files across a large network or servers situated around the world. So, when a user visits your site from Sri Lanka, they are downloading information from the server closest to them. The load time is faster on your site because the bandwidth is spread across so many different servers. Traffic spikes and DDOS attacks can also be reduced with the use of CDNs.

Use fast hosting services

Having a fast hosting service is crucial for your business, especially when your business is completely web-based. You can’t compromise on this one in ecommerce. The site will face a dramatic increase in speed once you make this change. You can use popular hosting services like BlueHost or WP Engine to experience instant results.

Install caching plugins

If you’re using WordPress, the best way to cut loading time is to install a caching plugin like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache. They are both free to download and easy to use. These plugins help in reducing load time and have a couple of other important features as well. If you aren’t using WordPress, try adding browser caching.

Use a good theme

Prevention is better than cure. It is better to choose a proven and reliable theme and design if you want to avoid any speed or load issues at all. Your site theme speaks a lot about your business in general. It is frustrating to see web designers go all out in making the site look terrific, but failing to get any good SEO rankings on the site or low speed.

A good looking website is just as important as it was 5 years ago, but with the added SEO perspective. Nowadays, developers add so many extra features on WordPress themes that the site is bound to take 10 seconds or more to load. The key is to be minimalistic and pay a lot of importance to having great content on the site.

Last Word:

Some of these tips are easy to implement, whereas others require advanced technical skills. Once you know the reason behind your low email open rates and compare them against conversions, you can fix this part of your sales funnel. Many successful companies like Uber go for a minimalistic approach in website design to enable smooth flow of website elements in combination with content. Try these fixes and record the metrics post experiment to compare the results.